In a fit of sloth, Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) has become among the companies to outsource/automate its Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) [PDF] (see Title 17 of the U.S. Code) takedown request process. Unfortunately, its partners' codes appear to be badly broken and posting a whole host of false positives.

For those unfamiliar, the DMCA gives an apparatus where companies can send requests to search engine firms like Google Inc. (GOOG), demanding they remove certain search results that are believed to contain "stolen" intellectual property. By blacklisting sites, companies can stop users from finding them and (in theory) halt the spread of the "stolen" work.

In fact Microsoft's third-party DMCA takedown contractor Marketly llc, asked Google to remove "bing.com" from its search results 11 times. Microsoft's contractor also asked Google 335 times to take down its own homepage, on Microsoft's behalf.

In a testimonial on its homepage Marketly quotes Microsoft as pleased with its performance, quoting, "Marketly has engineered solutions that address today’s anti-piracy challenges, producing quantifiable results for Microsoft. We are pleased with Marketly’s responsiveness. They have been very easy to work with. – Online Piracy Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation..."

Those takedowns were among the high profile targets of a July 27, 2012 takedown request list on Google's clearinghouse of takedown information and chronicled by chillingeffects.org – a collaboration between the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and various law school professors. Among other high profile targets of Microsoft's/leakid's July scattershot include a number of news sites, such as BBC News, CBS Corp. (CBS), Rotten Tomatoes, TechCrunch, Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX) CNN, ScienceDirect, RealClearPolitics, and The Huffington Post (among others).

Microsoft's contractors have sent out nearly 5 million takedown requests to Google alone, so it's easy to note how such sloppy errors could occur, though you'd think the partners could be a bit smarter with their filtering.